John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town in Essex, and is known as an internationally renowned novelist. His childhood was marked by an oppressively conformist English suburban culture and an intensely conventional family life, from which he sought escape. Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to 18. He then briefly attended the University of Edinburgh before beginning compulsory military service in 1945. After serving in the military for two years, Fowles attended Oxford, where he discovered the writings of French existentialists such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. These philosophers' ideas about conformity and the will of the individual resonated with Fowles, who received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer.
Fowles spent several years teaching in France, Greece, and London before beginning to write in earnest. His time in Greece, particularly on the island of Spetsai, was of great importance to him as it was there that he began to write poetry and overcome a long-time repression about writing. He completed the first draft of his first novel, The Collector, in four weeks in 1960, and it was published in 1963 to critical acclaim and commercial success. This allowed Fowles to devote all of his time to writing and he went on to publish a number of successful novels, including The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. In addition to his novels, Fowles also wrote a variety of non-fiction pieces, including essays, reviews, and forewords/afterwords to other writers' novels. He also wrote the text for several photographic compilations. Fowles lived in Lyme Regis, Dorset, from 1968, where he served as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum for a decade. He passed away on November 5, 2005 after a long illness.